Scalability at Youtube

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Scalability at YouTube Problems Youtube was facing First of I will start talking about the problems they faced at YouTube was facing. YouTube has faced a lot of problems in its life time so far and the main issues they faced were with scalability. The main reason YouTube faced so many issues was due to its large and rapid growth, YouTube went from a small website to a technology giant and large player in the IT industry practically overnight. The solution to dealing with this large and sudden growth was to keep things simple, by using simplicity this allowed YouTube to cope with the large growth. The simplicity approach was used to conquer a lot of problems. Make it simple, look for the simplest solution to a problem, sure the problem…show more content…
At YouTube the use of python makes doing this easier as the dynamic nature of python makes it easier to do. In other words “no matter how bad your API is you can stub or modify or decorate your way out of a lot of problems”. Other scalability techniques used by YouTube would be to say that they cheated a little or to say instead of data being correct it is approximate correctness. What is meant by cheating is that not all of their servers are consistent at the same time a good example of this is that if a user writes a comment on a video then instead deploying that comment to all servers in the network and keeping all data consistent what they have done at YouTube is they done it so that the system does not have to have globally worldwide consistent transactions. Meaning that when the a user rights a comment on a video he/she sees that comment instantly however someone on the other side of the world may not see that comment for a couple milliseconds, in other words the cheat. The data will be consistent in the end, the comments are not financial transaction therefore it is essential that you know when to cheat, for example if it was a financial transaction where a user is purchasing something then it is not good enough for the data must be consistent. Another main part of the cheating technique is knowing when to fake data, for example to say that “The fastest function call is the one that doesn’t” or hasn’t
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